


the shadow & the soul

by fallingvoices



Series: certain dark things [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Daemon Touching, First Time, Hurt/Comfort, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Mutual Pining, Pre-War Brooklyn, intimacy issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-18
Updated: 2018-05-18
Packaged: 2019-05-08 17:03:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14698557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallingvoices/pseuds/fallingvoices
Summary: Brooklyn evenings in their Red Hook flat were naturally similar: black coffee, windows open, radio on. Bucky read aloud from cheap pulps with extraordinary titles:Dark Avenger, Exit For A Dame, Star Maker—or else sat with his hand against his mouth, eyes dark, watching Steve draw.On the floor their daemons lay all tangled up in one another, stroking each other, telling small, laughing stories in their daemon-voices.(Brooklyn, from 1929 to 1937.)





	the shadow & the soul

Sarah Rogers' daemon was a springhare, short-haired and golden-furred, with a long, black-tipped tail that curled about his body, as she napped in Sarah's lap. For many years, after her death, so would the image of them would remain so in Bucky's brain: the whip-slender woman, whose hair was turning greyish blond, looped in a well-made bun; and the sleeping daemon, who yawned sometimes, and then curled up a little tighter, her paws meddling with Sarah's sewing. Sarah, smiling, but silent, would untangle the threads, and at her feet would sit Steve—smaller still then, twelve-years-old—reading aloud a story to her. Then they would look up at the door opening: Bucky coming in in a rush of cold air, carrying in the suet pies and veal-marrow stew his ma had made extras of, thoughtfully, for the Rogers. Poor dears, she said, her own yellow-breasted marshbird-deamon perched smartly upon her shoulder: and the winter bound to get worse in a month's time! You make sure they eat it all; whatever leftovers you stock up in the icebox, Bucky, else they'll be sure to give it away to the unfortunates.

They sat to eat, the three of them: Sarah and Steve and Bucky, and below the table Sasja and Malann grappled like pups, biting at each other, stroking each other's furs and feathers, and telling the incredible tales of the day. Then pudding: steamed marmalade pudding, with brown bread and butter, and coffee, scalding. The hot, caramelized treacle stuck to Bucky's mouth.

He never wanted to go home, and so some evenings he didn't, but stayed, pleased to kick out his legs on the frayed settee and to read the neglected paper, making eyes at the cartoon dames. Sasja curled her content and warm little body—an otter, often, or else a prairie dog; she wasn't particular—upon his lap. Sarah was sewing, her hands moving rapidly, easily, threading needle and cottonwool. Steve, his eyes big and dark in a pale face, sat upon his bed nearest the stove, Mal sprawled next to him: he had, then, been convalescing from a bout of pneumonia, and Bucky had brought him the latest _Doc Savage_.

Bucky was thirteen, a whole year older, and looked on Steve's sickly form with a patronizing protectiveness so fierce it had ceased to surprise anyone. Sarah regarded this as a kindness. She loved her son selfishly and passionately: no Rogers on this green earth had ever done anything halfway. She and Bucky respected each other more than they liked each other. They were united in their shared adoration of Steve.

In the pale morning, when Bucky awoke, Mal and Sasja had changed into domestic, ratty cats—one brown of fur, one fair—and had curled up into one another, dozing quietly upon the faded rug. He could feel them at the frontiers of his own body, their breaths and their paws all tangled up together. Steve slept underneath a pile of blankets, he was burning hot, and Bucky crawled into the bed, waking him up a little, so he would stir, murmur, "Buck—?" and roll over easily into him. They had another hour's worth of sleep before they would be made to depart to school. Bucky stuck his nose into the crook of Steve's neck and dreamed about two-bodied creatures who were put into one.

 

* * *

 

As long as Bucky had known Steve, Malann had taken on all the fantastical shapes his imagination had thought good to think up: lion cub, jackrabbit, a rattlesnake so small she had been able to curl herself around his wrist and gone right to sleep. Or else she changed into a wombat, a wasp, a small, smart, quick-witted capuchin. Also Steve drew her as a dragon, as full and real as something from comicbooks or a cheap pulp novel: _Amazing Stories!_ —or a griffin, or a sea lion; and she—as daring as he—took form, unhesitatingly, the way you knew you weren't supposed to. There was something unearthly to a daemon in dragon-form. Didn't the preacher sermon against it on Sundays, advocating instead for gentle-bodied, unextraordinary daemons, who could support the home and carry the burden of difficult life? But Steve drew bizarre creatures, difficult beasts: half-hyena, half-dolphin, a raven's head on a beetle's body. All of it was impossible and unworldly. Bucky had trouble looking away.

"Showoff," said Sasja, curling her lips over her teeth.

"You ought to _try_ it," Mal said haughtily. Sasja shifted into a tigress cub and leaped upon her, and they rolled in the dust, screeching with laughter. Steve sat on the fire escape with his feet dangling; he had his sketchbook tucked protectively against his skinny chest. Bucky, looking up at him from the story below, thought he was crowned in gold, from the sunshine. He was a small king, and Bucky his loyal knight: Lancelot to Arthur … They invented worlds so, of an afternoon.

Then Sasja came and curled about his legs, purring, and the image in her head and in his was of a white horse, which made him laugh; and changing rapidly into a small ferret she scampered up his body under his clothes. Her own laughter was thrumming against his collarbone. "What're you thinking about?" Steve asked, and Bucky was so startled he answered:

"Knights," and then found himself having to explain the whole affair; Arthurian tales and all. But Steve was delighted. In a minute's breath he had sketched up a royal castle, a fair maiden, a cavalier upon a noble mount. A few sloping lines of black, that was all—and yet the drawing spoke to Bucky, and he next asked for a Fountain of Eternal Youth, a Val of No Return, a Round Table. Panel upon panel unspooled beneath Steve's hands, Bucky seated next to him, crowding him against the sun-hot side of the fire escape, and at the end they had a full ten pages of them: a small kingdom of their very own. Then Steve with a sudden burst of laughter made them another knight, a knight who wore Bucky's face, or something very near. His daemon, of course, was a horse, a white great steed as Sasja had dreamed to be, for none but a daemon would let themselves be ridden so. He rode into the low dark valleys and the high white mountains, looking for the Graal. _Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil_ , Steve scribbled on—this had been the subject of the sermon this morning; the words had rung in Bucky's head like a bell all the day—at the bottom of the page; and Bucky scowled.

"Well, isn't that shabby," he said, "you think I'm going to croak soon, Rogers?" and he wrestled away the pencil and wrote underneath in his neat looping hand:

_for Thou art with me._

 

* * *

 

Streetfights were inescapable, and they happened every single day: you didn't touch another boy's daemon under pain of a busted head, but everywhere else was fair game, which meant scrappy brawls in backalleys, far from the attention of adults. The older kids whose daemons had settled had often an unfair advantage, as daemons who knew their own bodies fought harder and meaner; but the younger could change at will, and escalated the fight to unknown heights. In this Steve was the worst of them all. Mal would become a hissing serpent, a clawing hyena, a lion cub—and though she was small and frail, still she could frighten, a little. Older, bigger boys laughed, though: they knew the Rogers kid was going to die one winter. Their mamas had told them so; so? What was Bucky gonna do about it? Knock in their teeth and blacken their eyes, was what. Afterwards he dragged Steve back home and patched him up, and tried to knock some sense into his hard head.

"It's like you're looking to get hit," he said, exasperated, the summer after he turned fourteen. Steve sucked in a breath and stared stubbornly at the sprained wrist Bucky was dressing. He wasn't gonna be able to draw for weeks; was he happy about that, Bucky asked. Sasja in wild dog-form was dragging her raspy tongue along Mal's blood-matted fur.

"But," said Steve, his jaw set. "They were knocking old Miss Kowalski around, Buck. Tryinna get her grocery shop." He was thirteen, for at least _another_ two days.

Miss Kowalski was nearing a hundred years old and was blinder than a bat. "Yeah, well," said Bucky, after a pause.

"You can't go about saving all the old Misses's tins o' ham and eggs."

Malann had tried to change into a lioness—Bucky'd seen as much—and got about as far as the head before Piero Barsotti had kneed her across the way. Even the gang kids who mucked about with the Barsotti kids had edged away a little, at that. You didn't touch another boy's daemon: it was streetcode, sure as the sun set. And Steve had gasped a hard little gasp and doubled over like he'd kicked in his ribcage. Then Bucky had come down like the fury of god—

"Stupid," said Sasja, furious too. She was a mutt-dog, brown and black all over, and she clamped her teeth around the scruff of Mal's neck and shook her a little, the way Bucky wished he could do with Steve. Steve felt it anyhow. He stared down at the daemons entangled on the bathroom floor, then back at Bucky with enormous eyes.

"She got away," he said. Earnest as a penny, Steve Rogers was. "That's gotta count for something."

"You're still a blockhead," said Bucky.

Mal had gone lax in Sasha's grasp, willing, submissive. Steve said nothing, but he nodded unhappily—you keep telling me, Buck—and then he leaned his hard head against Bucky's shoulder and he closed his eyes. His hair was hot and smelled of blood and the sun.

 

* * *

 

"Bucky." Rebecca, age seven-and-three-quarters, tugged on his sleeve. " _Bucky_."

Bucky then was fourteen, almost fifteen, and too grand for sisterly antics. But with a sigh that purported to convey precisely how magnanimous he was, talking to her, and because he resisted her nothing, he crouched scowling to her level and said: "What."

She pointed at Sasja, who had it in her mind to be a sparrow that day, and had nestled in his hair, fluffing up her feathers. Rebecca said, giggling: "Why hasn't Sasja _settled_ yet? Maria's daemon has."

Maria was Rebecca's best friend's Elena's older sister, and therefore Rebecca's idol in this life and the next. She was a year younger than Bucky, and real pretty too. Bucky had glanced at her shamefacedly a few times—but it was true her daemon had settled, a couple of months ago, as a neat-looking gerbil. Maria wore plaited skirts and white shirts and black ties, and tied her smooth, glossy black hair back.

"Why don't you ask her?" he said, a little roughly, a little unkindly, because he felt—as often he had felt lately, as Sasja showed no sign of favoring any form over another—gauche and needy about it.

Rebecca pouted. "I did. She won't _tell_ me."

"Then," said Bucky, "maybe it's none of your business, is it?" He leveled a sour look at Basilius, who was a mouse, perched on her shoulder. "Don't you know better?"

"I don't know either," he pointed out in his dainty voice, and wasn't that the problem: half of Bucky's friends's daemons had settled by now, and whenever anyone would ask they would look smug and superior and wouldn't _say a word_.

("They don't know," Steve had said, knowingly. "There's no reason, Buck! It just happens. Certain."

"There's gotta be a _reason_ ," Bucky had said, exerting logic, but then a fire hydrant in Verona St. had exploded, and all the neighborhood kids had swarmed to the disaster like honeybees: they had been soaked to the bone all afternoon, jubilant, elated, ecstatic.)

"Ask mom," he suggested, but Rebecca wrinkled her button of a nose and said,

"She said I'm not old enough. I'm _eight_."

"You're seven."

"I'm _nearly_ eight," she amended hotly, then wailed, "What if Basilius _never_ settles?"

Basilius looked pained, inasmuch as a mouse could look pained.

"Every daemon settles," said Sasja, from her nest of Bucky's hair and a few twigs and dry leaves. She burrowed a little deeper, digging her tiny, tiny claws into his scalp. Bucky manfully resisted the urge to yelp. Sasja added loftily: "We just know when the time is right," which appeared to placate Rebecca, who held Sasja in great awe even in sparrow-form; but afterwards she said, melancholy, "I wish I knew." She shifted into a cat upon his shoulders, dislodging stray feathers, and sat straight-backed and grave. "What'd you want me to be, if you could ask?"

Bucky thought about it. "It's gotta be something big," he said finally. "Strong. So's we can—"

"Protect Steve," said Sasja. She rubbed her feline head against his. "Yes."

It did not occur to either of them that there could be a life in which protecting Steve was not a central preoccupation. Then he thought abruptly: "What'd you think Mal'll be?"

"A pelican with a bear's head, if she's lucky," said Sasja, and wasn't that a fact.

 

* * *

 

Winter.

Deep dark winter like a Siberian frost. Bucky slept curled around Rebecca's littler form and dreamed of dark and tender things. Sasja and Basilius were lodged against their icy feet, in the shapes of white-furred arctic ermines; Basilius was so small he fit perfectly between Sasja's paws. Rebecca dreamed: a nightmare, which made her lash out, and Bucky awoke gasping, to his father, bent over their bed with a pale, pale face.

"The Rogers boy is dying," said George Barnes, and Bucky reared back as though stricken. Then he disentangled himself from Rebecca, who murmured and frowned in her sleep, and reached without a word for a woolen sweater.

In the kitchen his mother was making black coffee, her eyes tight and harried, her daemon trembling quietly. She pressed a thermos bottle into his hands, and the last of last night's thick dumpling soup. "Try to make him eat," she said, "promise, James,"—which she never called him, but the curl of her mouth was unhappy and cruel: she feared that Sarah had only sent for Bucky to say goodbye. Still, it didn't hurt to try; and her son was taller than she remembered, tall and dark in her kitchen, with his eyes very grave. He had grown almost into adulthood. Sasja wove around his legs, keening gently in wordless pain. Bucky said, "I will, ma," threw a dark scarf around his throat, and left not looking back.

It was only two blocks to Sarah and Steve's, and the street was frozen, deserted, silent as a tomb. Bucky's ears burned, and his eyes too. Sasja, in the form of a quivering weasel, curled up in his pocket: a pocketful of warmth. Their blood was beating fast.

He climbed the staircase, tasting blood, and hammered on the door. Sarah opened it at once, she had been waiting, and he fell into her arms, gasping, "Steve—?"

"He's asleep," she said; she had her winter coat on, and her face was white as a linen shroud. Then she said, "I need you to stay with him, Bucky."

"I—where are you going?" he asked, bewildered.

Her head bowed in silent grief. "The priest," she said humbly. "My boy will have the last rites."

" _No_ ," said Bucky, and Sasja moaned in pain. But Sarah nodded, firm, and poured them the coffee in little porcelain cups, and said,

"You must sit up with him. I may be long."

"Anything," Bucky said, eyes wide, "I swear, I swear," but once he was looking over Steve's skinny shivering body in the pile of blankets, the mattress pushed as close to the stove as could be, the promise turned to ash in his mouth. He approached the bed timidly. Steve did not stir; when he reached out and touched his wrist it was hard and cold as bone. "Steve," he said, and then again, "Steve," but Steve's eyes did not open. Was he breathing? He bent low, listening; yes, there it was, a thin frail rasp of air, but he was breathing, and with hot tears burning Bucky took off his coat and lay it on top of Steve, too, so that he would know he was no alone. Mal was nowhere to be seen—in the blankets—buried—? Bucky was sixteen and his best friend was about to die.

"You don't gotta," Bucky whispered, his useless hands clenching into fists. "What the hell good's winter if it kills you, Steve," —he was furious, he was angry as anything, rage was bitter on his lips. "You don't gotta go right now," he whispered, but Steve slept on. Deep and dark. The Rogers kid was always gonna die one winter. Everyone said so. Even Steve had known …

"What can I do?" he whispered, sitting next to the bed, and Sasja poked her little weasel-head out of her pocket and said, "I know."

Before he'd time to ask she'd shimmied down his legs and up the bed and then had burrowed inside, changing halfway, so that when she pushed her way to Steve, nosing underneath the blankets, she had become a large dog, black and brown, her tail lashing. She curled up to him, her back pressing against his lean, gaunt ribcage, and Bucky, staring, felt her—the solidity, the blood-beating reality of her—warm up Steve's body. It was close to an electric shock. Steve didn't wake from his near-death slumber. But Sasja pushed her head against his stomach, and Bucky shaking hard with the confusion of it scrambled over him to the other side of the bed and wrapped himself up around Steve, too, the way he did with Rebecca back home when the nights were cold and dark. It wasn't the same, though: never had Sasja let anyone touch her the way she now snuffled against Steve, blowing hot hair against his belly. Yes: he could _feel_ her, stronger and better than he normally could, every cell and atom in her body. He slung his arm hard around Steve's chest and fisted his hand in her fur. She was panting softly.

Then Malann awoke; she had been huddled up against Steve's throat as a very small hedgehog, her eyes hard like tiny black gems, and she nudged up to Sasja, so weak that she couldn't even sleep. With a clumsy paw Sasja tucked her in beneath her, she radiated warmth—even Bucky was not so warm, hot as a furnace, and Steve so unnaturally cold …

He pressed his face against the back of Steve's neck and carded his fingers through Sasja's coarse fur, taking care not to touch Mal by accident; though—he imagined—it would not be so sacrilegious, to touch her now. But anyway she had wrapped herself into a tight, hard ball. He pushed a rough kiss against Steve's hair instead. This did not feel abnormal. Affection was hard-won and swallowed up in Steve. A thick rain had picked up: he could hear it thundering against the small shuttered window. Something was trying to come in.

He thought: _we are keeping Death away_. And then he saw It: the skeleton, the pale horse, the scythe; an awful sight, a terrible mirror image of their teenage knights and paladins, reaching its skeletal hand towards Steve's hair. "Get back!" Bucky shouted, or thought that he shouted; perhaps he too was asleep. He believed not, however, and conjured up a fiery sword and magic incantations to keep Death at bay. He must, he thought wildly, he must keep watch: if he did not stay awake and alive, it would pluck Steve from the bed like a rag doll. Sasja must see it, too: her lips were curled up around bitter wolflike fangs.

They must keep watch. If they fell asleep, Bucky thought—with the fierce conviction of a boy—Steve would be dead in the morning; and in two days the funeral procession would bear his body in the ground. They must keep watch at any cost. But hours passed, and still Sarah did not come back.

At dawn, when the pale grey light trickled in, Sasja lifted her head and said, in a new voice, a voice he'd never heard before, "He's calmer now."

Bucky nodded, his head against Steve's. He could hear it, too: Steve's breath had evened out, and he was a little warmer. Sasja pushed her damp nose against his hand, and he even frowned. His fever had broken. His back was damp with sweat.

"I didn't know we could do that," said Bucky soberly, whispering it, his voice still hoarse with swallowed tears. "I don't think we're allowed … " But what was forbidden seemed inconsequent now. They had kept watch. All the long night.

"I knew," said Sasja, "I think. Bucky, I'm not going to change anymore. It can't be wrong, you know," and it felt like it ought to be wrong, church sermons and the fires of hell, eternal damnation, _deviancy_ ; but still it wasn't: couldn't be, long as Steve was real and alive.

 

* * *

 

Sarah found them asleep, when stone-faced and alone she climbed the stairs to her tenement flat, having found no one in the storm to administer to her dying son. She found the two boys, fair and dark, wrapped up in each other under the blankets; the smaller daemon had curled in a ball on the pillow, prickly all over with soft spikes; the greater, an auburn-brown dog, sat sphinx-like next to them, the whole length of her stretched along the body of the bed: a guard. Her intelligent head lifted. Her dark eyes met Sarah's very evenly.

Sarah dropped down next to the bed, her hair falling loose about her face, her breath hard and short in her lungs, and she said, "Oh, my dear. My dear."

 

* * *

 

"A dog-daemon," said George Barnes, when Bucky returned, two days after, exhausted and shiningly happy: Steve had eaten that afternoon, a thin hot broth.

"So?" said Bucky defensively. He ladled his ma's oxtail stew into his ma's family plates. Sasja butted her head against his legs, snorting.

"I thought only butlers had dog-daemons," said Rebecca, kicking her heels, and giggling. Basilius was a lump in her pocket, asleep. "And parlor-maids."

"You read too much," said his brother to her shortly. Sasja was a mutt, to be sure, shaggy and reddish-brown, but she was tall and strong across the shoulders, and she would be an advantage in a fight. _Hah!_ he thought, with a fierce and irrational pride—try the prim poodles and spaniels who populated the rich brownstones uptown! They wouldn't last a second against her.

"Or soldiers," said his pa. He looked hard at Bucky. "You'll be a soldier, son?"

"No!" said Bucky wildly.

"Will there be a war?" asked Rebecca, wide-eyed.

"No," said Bucky. "Of course not, runt," and Sasja laughed, a soft dog-laugh, nudging her head into his palm, and begging for a bite of meat.

 

* * *

 

On his seventeenth birthday, Bucky Barnes made time with Madalena the grocer's daughter. Her daemon was a seagull, who laughed somewhat bitterly at the time, and he felt uneasy about it all, and uneasy about feeling that way, too—wasn't he meant to like girls? Girls liked him well enough, that was certain. Even some of those who'd grown up on his block now couldn't look him in the face, but blushed and twisted their gloves into knots. So he took a couple of them dancing at the Arcadia after that; and: kissing, now, he _liked_ kissing, liked also dancing the Carolina Shag until he was laughing and exhausted and happy, and his partner tucked her hand in his and tugged him towards the bar, where he bought them dime shakes and lemon ices. But none of them ever touched Sasja: she wouldn't let them. She didn't want them much either.

"Why?" he asked, bewildered.

She rolled onto her back, her tongue lolling out, sunning her pale belly. It was a rare bright day, March-thin and pale. Her eyes were closing in doggish pleasure. "You know why," she said.

Bucky glanced away, nervous, then said in a rush, "we're not supposed to want that," and she laughed at him in disdain.

"So? So what? I don't care," she said, heart of his heart.

But he did care. He did. Bucky was a good son and a hard worker, and if ma or pa figured it out—if Rebecca found out—it didn't bear thinking about. So he went a-dancing, and ignored Sasja's haughty looks.

"What's it like, then?" was what Steve—pale and nonchalant—had to say about it. But Mal was bright-eyed next to him, looking on Sasja jealously. She was a bobcat this afternoon, with slim, pointed ears; Bucky had a mad urge to touch her—to see the aftershocks of his touch on Steve's thin face.

He made a grimace instead: they were sprawled over the Barneses' drawing-room floor reading the new Phantom, and Steve had been belligerent and unhappy all afternoon, which meant he was hiding something. "Messy," said Bucky, sighing. "Complicated."

"You like it," Steve deduced. A regular Sherlock Holmes, weren't he? Bucky scowled sour and looked away.

"Maybe I could set you up with a dame," he said, snappishly, and Steve pulled a face.

"Please don't," he said, like he didn't want a date, like he was above it all. But Bucky looked at his long, clever hands, his knobby wrists; then looked up at his face, too: Steve's eyes were lowered, his eyelashes long and dark against his cheeks—he looked immensely sad. Bucky said, hoarsely:

"Steve. Steve," —sitting up, racking his hands through his hair. "What's the matter?"

In reply Mal jumped upon Sasja on the rug, and the two wrestled madly, delightedly, as Mal changed between shapes faster than Bucky could see: a fox, a jackrabbit, a possum, a dingo kid; until at last Sasja got tired of it and clamped her jaws hard around the scruff of her neck, and Mal went limp all at once, rolling onto her back and baring her throat. Sasja licked her ruff down, not unkindly.

"Ma's sick," said Steve.

 

* * *

 

Steve dropped out of school when Sarah had to stop working the night shifts, and took a job at a printing-house near the Bridge; he started dreadful fights in back alleys with the worst of the worse kids, and trudged home with a bloodied nose and, once, horribly, a broken jaw. Mal slowly stopped changing into extraordinary forms, which Bucky regretted; but Sarah was sick, and it seemed foolish and childlike to keep dreaming of knights and dragons. Her springhare daemon rarely moved very much anymore.

Bucky picked up garagework of a summer, and took to it; he walked Becca to her evening classes and then took the trolley down to work the late shifts, when the garage doors were open wide long into the night, blazing with electric light. Steve loathed it unreservedly, begrudging him the work of his muscles and the broader slope of his shoulders, and Mal, too, gradually ceased looking up to Sasja, as she had always done; so that the tension between them was fraught and unhappy. Bucky barely knew how to fix it: he was afraid—he was painfully afraid of his own wanting. His devotion to Steve felt too great to contend with, and once or twice he abruptly ended a terse conversation simply by throwing up his hands, entrusting Steve to all the patron saints of the dogged, stubborn assholes, and walking away. Steve was too irritable, too disconsolate, his sorrow was too magnificent, and Bucky could not take on his friend's grief on his own shoulders.

He told himself he would have done so, if he could. But when Steve sat next to him, his collarbones sharp and visible underneath his cotton shirt, the longing in Bucky was so alarming as to make him snap at the smallest annoyance.

The fight, when it came, felt inevitable; in truth, it had been brewing for months, simmering like a low light behind every minute disagreement.

Steve was hurtful, spiteful. Mal seethed in anger. They were so intimate that they knew well how to wound each other. At last Sasja leaped upon Mal in furious humiliation, snapping her teeth, and Bucky spat—"at least I'm keepin' my ma fed, you dumb shit," and stopped up short to see Steve's face go stark white.

"Steve," he faltered, helplessly, hopelessly. His hands reached out as though to soothe away the horror of it.

"No," said Steve. His voice was toneless and without pain. "You're right, ain't you?"

Sasja whined, and made to touch her nose to Mal's; who twitched, and changed into a lemming and scurried up Steve's pants and slipped into his sleeve.

_"Steve."_

They stood below Steve's window, on the fire escape; Bucky couldn't hardly remember what had started the fight. They had made plans to go to the movie palace, hadn't they, and he'd had to take on a garage shift instead— _Libeled Lady_ with Loy and Powell—

"It's alright, Buck," said Steve, in the same hollow, horrible voice. "You gotta do what you gotta do."

"I could hand it off to Jack Anderson," said Bucky desperately, "I could." Sasja wound herself around his legs, panting a little, and looking up at Steve with such miserable adoration Bucky felt it deep in himself: the fervor of their love for him.

"Right." Steve shrugged a hunched shoulder, turned away. Already Bucky mattered not a bit to him. "I'll see you around, Buck," and he climbed the fire escape two at a time, slipping in nimbly through the window.

Bucky sank to his heels and pressed his palms hard against his eyes, and then stood up, and went and changed into his overalls, breathing hard, and walked all the way down to the garage. Sasja's ears were pressed flat against her head, her tail tucked in. She did not blame him. She, too, had felt his fear, his deep-seated unhappiness … Bucky had ruined it after all: the best goddamn thing in his sorry life, because he couldn't look at Steve without wanting him.

"You haven't talked much to Steve lately," said his ma to him after a fortnight. "D'you want to take down some soup to them; some bread; make Sarah eat something solid of an evening?"

Bucky sat at the kitchen table and filled in the crosswords, and said, "Nah."

"You might want a chance to say goodbye," said his ma not ungently, and for the first time in years she brushed her palm against Sasja's head, so that Bucky shuddered all over and shouted, "Ma!"

"Well," she said, and touched his hair briefly. "Who knows: she might be well; Sarah Rogers has made it through harder winters."

"She will," said Bucky, confident, gripping the pencil, and Sasja's head lay heavy on his lap. But one late afternoon that October Steve showed up at his door in his shirtsleeves, hatless, with his hands all over with ink and his eyes pale as moons.

"Buck," he said, and then his voice cracked in two and Bucky knew, right away, without Steve needing to say. And then, abruptly, the world changed.

 

* * *

 

"Move in with me," said Bucky, "we'll put the cushions on the floor, take a place in the Heights," and Steve said, "I can get by on my own."

But Mal said: "Yes. Yes. _Bucky_ ," and brushed against his hand. Bucky picked her up, unthinking, and held her—gently gently—against his shoulder. Steve closed his eyes. Nodded. He was very thin. He hadn't eaten in two days.

 

* * *

 

Their flat was small, smaller still than Sarah's had been—but Sarah was _dead_ , her daemon had dissolved into gold dust in Steve's arms—and as the winter came on hard and frozen they shared a bed. It was only natural: and if Bucky wanted to bring home a date, Steve said, he could make scarce—don't be an idiot, said Bucky roughly. Don't you be a fuckin' idiot.

At dawn, with Steve's skinny chest pressing against his back, Bucky dreamed. He awoke gasping, trembling, overcome with want, and stumbled to the bathroom to take care of it; then made hard black coffee and drank it standing, in his undershirt and boxers, shivering in the middle of their kitchen.

 

* * *

 

In 1937 advertising make itself smart, and targeted daemons. _Hawkins' All-Feather TREATMENT For Shedding Avian Friends_ , they said, and _MAKE DULL FUR LUSTROUS WITH MA BETHANY'S LIFE-SAVING HERBAL OINTMENT_ , and _Make Provision For Family Daemons At Martins Bank Ltd._ and _You'll Want To Treat Your Daemon To This All-American Vacation!!!_ Steve worked for the local WPA center for a while, designing posters; then for the corner store stocking shelves; then again the printing-house. They supped with Bucky's family on Sundays.

Of a night they went to the dance-hall, where Bucky introduced Steve to date after date—none of whom, it seemed, were much interested—none of whom he was interested in: Steve politely made small talk and praised their daemons' manners, and walked them home at the end of the night none the worse for wear; it was a running joke that no girl ever was in danger of being kissed unawares, if she was stepping out with Steve Rogers.

"Why, though?" asked Bucky, running tipsy, and feeling real put-out about it: he'd made an effort, hadn't he, to surrender Steve to a dancing-partner? He'd made the sacrifice, and Steve was acting—ungrateful.

"Go to bed, Buck," said Steve tiredly.

He drew relentlessly, all the goddamn time of the day and night. Smudges of graphite and ink on his fingers. Bucky wanted these hands on him, and hated absurdly that he did. Some of these drawings he kept away from Bucky, which Bucky tried—honest and true—not to be hurt by: but he _was_ hurt, and Sasja …

Sasja looked knowing and unbearably smug. He liked to brush her fur so she'd look real smart, and in retaliation he spent a fortune on a lotion that made her smell like musk and vanilla bourbon, which she loathed; that morning Steve laughed so hard he nearly toppled off the breakfast-table. They had porridge, with real melting butter. Bucky wanted to say, _Why won't you show me? Why? When I love you?_ and then he shied away from the thought, like a coward, and instead of saying anything he nudged Steve for the morning edition: Europe was turning ugly and dark.

 

* * *

 

"Rebecca's looking pretty these days," said Steve, apropos of nothing one Sunday night, as they walked home: dinner had been pot roast and blueberry pie at the Barneses's, and he looked to be in a thoughtful mood. He had surreptitiously watched Bucky all evening; Bucky had meant not to notice. Those glimpses of Steve were more than he knew how to contend with.

"Does she?" Bucky wrinkled her nose. Basilius had settled, that spring, into a very neat, very dapper magpie. Rebecca was endlessly proud. At Steve's side Mal prowled on cat-paws. She had been in that form for two days, though she always seemed disinclined to choose: perhaps a fortnight in one-body, then again she would change. And Steve looked—not unhappy—but a slight furrow creased his brow.

"Why did Sasja choose to be a dog?" he asked, abruptly.

"When—" Bucky looked at him, startled. "I—" He pushed his hair back, smearing his fingertips with pomade. "Dunno. Hell of a question to ask, Steve."

"I just," said Steve. "Wondered. Is all."

"Dogs are loyal," Bucky blurted out. He was thankful for the relative darkness of their staircase: his cheeks were hot. "So. I guess."

"Oh," said Steve.

"Are you happy?" he said then— _Steve_ said—to _Sasja_ ; the grotesque familiarity of it was jarring and sudden. Mal's ears pricked back alertly. Bucky's heart was thrumming hard, and he pushed in the door with a jerking motion, gripping the key too hard.

Sasja waited until they were inside and the latch was down, but grinned a doggish grin at Steve, her tongue lolling out. She sat on her haunches, her fur brushed real neat, and solemnly she said, "Yes. I am happy like this."

Steve was taking off his jacket. "Good," he said, slowly. He looked anywhere but at her now: ashamed that he had asked. They stood against opposite walls, daring not to look up.

So that in the end it was Malann—fierce-headed Malann, lion-hearted Malann, Mal who wouldn't settle and who wouldn't back down, so sure she was of herself when even Steve doubted—who moved, when Sasja could not move; who tugged herself so far from Steve's side it had to ache even to breathe, and in the span of a second turned bird and flew straight into Bucky's arms. Bucky staggered under the weight and the warmth of her. She was Steve's courage and Steve's righteous will, his selfishness, his desire always to do the thing that was right—was _this_ right?

But his hands closed around her, as her feathers changed into fur. And Steve was dark-eyed and determined as he too pushed into Bucky's space.

"Look," he said. "Bucky," like his name alone had meaning intricate, and clumsily kissed him.

Bucky fell back against the wall clutching at them both. He kissed back like a boy. It was plain enough Steve had never kissed anyone, and it mattered not a bit: all of Bucky's expertise, every time he had made time, nothing had ever compared. He kissed Steve's mouth and Steve's eyelids and Steve's hair. He tucked his face against his neck.

Between them Malann twisted her lithe body and leaped to the floor, and was caught by Sasja, who laid her out flat. Both of Bucky's hands were in Steve's hair: it turned out that kissing Steve was phenomenal. "How come," he said, against Steve's mouth, and then, "we should've done this ages ago," and Steve said—

"Then why didn't you just say," indignant, and then absurdly they were both laughing, pressed against the wall and breathing hard, mouth against smiling mouth. Their daemons lay entangled on the floor. Mal was purring up a storm.

"'s wrong, you know," said Bucky afterwards, more soberly.

"Nah," Steve said. His hands had pulled Bucky's shirttails out of his pants, and crawled underneath to touch the trembling skin of his belly. "I don't believe that." The force of his faith was like a star.

"Let's go to bed," Bucky decided, having had an Idea.

"Oh, I see how it is," said Steve, "you think I'm easy now," to which Bucky said flatly,

"No: I am," and once he had got his hands on his beltbuckle Steve shut up sweet and fast.

 

* * *

 

"Like this?"

"Yeah."

"Here?"

"Yes. Buck," said Steve in exasperation, "you might _think_ so but I happen not to be made of china."

"Hush your mouth. I'm tryin' to be," said Bucky loftily, "sentimental about this."

"You're terrible at it," said Steve, pitiless. "They must've run away screaming."

Bucky ducked down quickly to kiss his collarbone, and conceal the telling flush on his cheek.

"I love," he said later, swallowing, "I—your hands, Steve: fuck."

"Yeah?" He felt Steve's smile, and turned his head and sought his mouth, wanting more than a kiss—licked into Steve's mouth and jerked his hips into Steve's unhesitating touch. Steve was un-shy but possessive, and he stroked his hand down Bucky's chest, pressing against his abdomen, and lower down still, his knuckles brushing the wet tip of Bucky's dick. Bucky whined a little softly. Naked. Christ. Blasphemy. Steve was pale in the night-light, and his hair touched with gold.

Steve jerked him off sweet and easy, and afterwards Bucky had it in mind to _try_ , so he pushed him down against the pillow and put his mouth around his cock. He'd had it done to him, coupla times; each time, he'd wondered—but no longer, no need: Steve was surprisingly big, his hipbones sharp in Bucky's hands, his chest coming up and down hard with his breaths.

"So that's that," he said, afterwards, wiping his mouth. " _Huh_."

Steve frowned at him. "How's it taste?"

"Salty," said Bucky, "you ought to try it," and Steve kicked him on the thigh lazily, then drew him back up against him with both hands, so that they kissed slow and good against the pillow. It was stupendously easy. Intimacy came to them as uncomplicated and painless as it had always been. Bucky had missed his body pressed against against his own, all his life, and had never known it.

 

* * *

 

"You know we love you," said Malann to him seriously, as Bucky lazed on the fire escape reading a battered paperback— _Murder on the Orient-Express_. He was nearly to the end, having read it twice; Sasja was asleep at his feet. She repeated it fiercely: "We _love you_."

Bucky stared at her. Steve was in the kitchen. Strains of Ella Fitzgerald … It was hot, hot: a heat-storm was gathering down by the water.

"He won't say," said Mal primly. "He's too proud for that."

"How," said Bucky hoarsely, "how d'you get—you're so far apart, Mal!" He had in his head legends of witches, from books and folktales and nursery rhymes. Witches were beings who could easily separate from their daemons on long distances—and really it would make horrifying sense, if Steve turned out to be a witch. But this was 1937, and there were no witches in the world. The last of them had been gone in Salem—they were unnatural, perverse.

Folk'd use the same words for what they'd done together last night, though.

Mal rubbed her head against his hand, and biting back a grin he felt the marvel of it: the familiarity of her fur against his fingers. He wondered if Steve felt it too. When Sasja had, years ago, pushed her warm dog's body against Steve's dying boy-body, Bucky's heart had gone a-thundering in his chest. Gingerly, he stroked Mal's ears, and a low purr came from her throat.

"We've been experimenting," she said, proud about it too. "With distance. Tryin' to see how far apart we can get." She licked at his thumb. "We can go ten yards now."

"You're insane," said Bucky, "both of you," which he should've expected really; and Mal laughed and shimmied up onto his shoulders, so that when Steve came back, his suspenders hanging from his hips, he found her pawing and playing with Bucky's hair, and Sasja awake, watching them both severely. 

The sun in his hair. Steve looked disheveled and tired, not having slept much, and a little happy. He said: "What're you reading?"

Bucky showed it to him, juggling daemon. Agatha Christie.

"Ah," said Steve solemnly, and he retrieved his sketchbook from their bureau and kicked at Bucky's feet until he made him room on the fire escape. The metal was sun-hot against their backs and their sides. Come summer, when the heat-storms had passed, they would drag the mattress out and sleep in the warm dry night.

"Well?" he asked. "Shove over," so that Bucky had to make a show of sighing and slinging his legs to the side. Mal skidded down onto his lap, digging her claws in, and there curled up, apparently to sleep. Sasja huffed and shifted just enough to lay her heavy head against Steve's thighs. They might have changed daemons, for all strangers would know. Steve had a little smile, but he said nothing of what Mal had told him.

Instead: "What're you thinking about, then?"

"Witches," said Bucky, which was not untrue, and Steve seemed to accept this. "I guess I'd like to meet one. Someday."

 _Maybe you have_ , said his heart in Sasja's voice. _Maybe witches are made_.

But Steve shrugged and said nothing. He was still Steve, bird-bones and dirty mouth; still Bucky's best, best friend; Bucky's lover, come to that. This morning the world had changed. Now he could watch Steve's mouth, darkly, longingly, and Steve—after a while—would glance up at him and know. He wouldn't do a thing, though. They wouldn't kiss on the fire escape where anyone might see. They would wait, until dark.

But Steve sank his fingers into Sasja's fur, slowly, purposefully, stroking down the scruff of her neck to her bared throat. Bucky swallowed. He picked up Agatha Christie. The heat-storm was coming, far in the distance by the water, but there was time, till then, to finish a book and listen to Summertime on the radio, and draw dragons. There was time enough; there were years. Between them their daemons slept and dreamed their shared dreams.

**Author's Note:**

> This started out as a quick, 2K oneshot, promptly ballooned in proportion, and then started to ask the hard questions: what happens to Steve's daemon when he gets the serum? what happens to Bucky after the fall from the train? can the Winter Soldier have a daemon, or is he forever witch-like and separated from her? etc. etc. Consider it a series in potentia—for now.
> 
> Both the fic's title and the series' title are taken from Pablo Neruda's Sonnet VXII, because I am laughably predictable.
> 
> Thank you for reading! Come and wave hello [on tumblr](http://www.sombre-gods.tumblr.com), if you like.


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